WISE women work to change Wikipedia

UIC students update Wikipedia pages during a WISE WIKI event that aims to create and edit the pages of women in the STEM fields.

A group of women on campus are trying to change the current workings of Wikipedia.

WISE WIKI — a project managed by UIC’s Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) program — hopes to bridge the gender gap of women’s representation on Wikipedia.

Only 20 percent of people who edit Wikipedia pages are women, said Veronica Arreola, assistant director of the Center for Research on Women and Gender and the creator of WISE WIKI.

“Not only does this lead to a lack of women having Wikipedia pages, but having top-notch, thorough Wikipedia pages,” the project’s website states.

WISE WIKI hopes to mend this problem by training UIC students, especially female students, on the process of creating and editing Wikipedia pages.

“Women are not called experts in the media and do not get recognized or receive the awards they deserve,” Arreola said.

The group focuses its efforts on developing the existing Wikipedia pages of female faculty members in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Eventually, they hope to create more Wikipedia pages for female UIC faculty members.

“We want the pages to be rich with knowledge and information about how cutting edge their science is and how important their work is to their field,” Arreola said.

The group plans to continue editing Wikipedia pages over the summer and during the fall semester.